At 84, my grandpa still writes stories for his local newspaper, an occasional gig he’s held for decades. His latest installment covered a special jubilee: Local retiree Franz Nagel, aged 71, had donated blood for the 150th time.
Nagel has been sharing his life elixir for 50 years. A former painter, he donated for the first time with his colleagues when he was young. Then, he simply kept coming back. “The little prick doesn’t hurt at all, but it can have a big impact,” Nagel believes, and, as my grandpa notes, he is right: “Whoever donates blood 150 times offers 75 liters of his own blood for his fellow human beings—that’s roughly 13 times the total volume of the blood in his own body.”
To all the cats out there: How’s that for 13 lives? And, best of all, no one has to die. One man. One tiny prick. One drop at a time. Repeat for 50 years, and you get enough juice to replace 13 people’s blood entirely. Just like my grandpa’s newspaper articles, Franz’ contributions have added up.
In the movie Cloud Atlas, 19th-century lawyer Adam Ewing denounces his father-in-law’s complicity in slavery. The latter scoffs at his plans to join the abolitionist movement: “No matter what you do, it will never amount to anything but a single drop in a limitless ocean.” But Ewing knows what Franz Nagel has experienced firsthand. It’s a timeless, wonderful dynamic that’ll work forever in our favor: “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”
